One of my regular correspondents forwarded me an e-mail today about the 2005 Stella Awards, recognizing the stupidest successful lawsuits of that year.

I'll share it with you, because it is funny. I won't bother to clean up punctuation, etc., so don't blame me for it; that's just the way it's circulating. Most importantly, don't quit before you get to my comments at the end.

During my annual tour of the sideshows at the Allentown Fair this year, I gave Rickey's Believe It Or Not an enthusiastic thumbs up. It was very grisly, which I liked.

I did comment on the apparent copyright infringement, in a joking way. "I won't tell Ripley's if you don't," I wrote.

Well, Ripley's was watching. I got a call this morning from Alex Steele of Ripley's Entertainment. They had read my column, and want to track Rickey's down so they can send them a cease and desist letter.

I guess this is understandable. She said they had searched the Web and found an instance where someone was confused whether Rickey's was associated with Ripley's. When you're a respectable organization, you don't want to be mistaken for a bunch of guys putting needles through their faces and asking you to staple dollar bills to their chests.

"We just don't want a traveling sideshow we've never seen going with our mark," she said.

She said the matter probably will end with that stern letter. "A lot of people who infringe on our mark do it unintentionally," she said. "It's always weird things like this."

I've been in a couple of Ripley's museums, and I'm a particularly big admirer of their comic strip, which I've written about before. I'll risk a cease and desist letter and show you one of them below.

What are the 10 best series of novels, featuring the same characters and new stories?

O'Brian's 20 books about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, featuring Capt. Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin, may well be the best historical novels ever written, so they certainly make my list.

I decided to rule out such children's series as Nancy Drew (which started my wife, for one, as a reader) and the Hardy Boys and Chip Hilton, my two favorites. They're all pretty dated by now.

I did consider the Redwall novels by Brian Jacques, which are aimed at young readers but have plenty of adult appeal as well, but I left them off. I also ruled out trilogies such as "The Lord of the Rings," since they essentially tell one story, although I suppose you could argue that "The Hobbit" makes it a series. Same way with Mary Stewart's Arthurian trilogy about Merlin, which I loved. Much as I enjoy Carl Hiaasan's books, I left them out because even though there a couple of recurring characters, they aren't really a series.

Several real series I like didn't make the cut, most notably Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels. Here's what I ended up with, in no particular order:

I have been waiting my entire career to use that title for one of my columns, as a tribute to hippie novelist/poet Richard Brautigan. His books were strange, but I would argue that no one had better titles than he did.

Unfortunately, my headlines have to be three lines, and Trout Fishing in America never works right. On the blog, I don't have to worry about that.

I wrote a fishing column for Friday's paper, and I almost went with Trout Fishing in America anyway. But it was about stripers, not trout, and I was afraid readers would think the headline was a blooper. So I moved it over here.

Are there any Brautigan fans out there? I know lawyer Gary Asteak likes him, but I doubt that he reads this blog.

My wife was really into Brautigan when I met her, which is why I started reading him. Other than "Trout Fishing in America," my favorite, as I recall, was "A Confederate General from Big Sur."

These days, my literary preferences run more to historical fiction. In Books on Tape, I've begun my second run through Patrick O'Brian's amazing series of Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin novels about the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. Director Peter Weir drew on several of them for his excellent movie, "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World."

I wish they'd turn that into a series on movies, instead of, say, "Saw," "Grudge" or "Friday the 13th." I guess it's easier to make horror movies than epics at sea.

If you've never read one of these, I recommend you start with the first, "Master and Commander." Great action, great characters and really funny to boot.

This destructive blowhard’s latest moment in the spotlight came when he mocked Michael J. Fox for a political ad that Fox recorded on behalf of Missouri senatorial candidate Claire McCaskill. Fox, whose acting career was cut short by Parkinson’s disease, touts McCaskill because she supports embryonic stem cell research, which her opponent opposes.

What makes the ad so powerful is that Fox makes no effort to hide the extent of his affliction as he delivers his message. Bobbing and swaying, Fox concludes, “What you do in Missouri matters to millions of Americans. Americans like me.”

I was moved by the ad, and I suspect the same was true for many others.

I started two pretty good blog postings today, but they both ended up so long that I decided to convert them into columns. And now I'm out of time.

So I'll just leave you with two cool links I received today. One provides some interesting insight into why our government doesn't get tougher with Big Oil. The other is a preview of the next edition of my favorite TV show, "24."

The recent news that Johnny Callison had died at age 67 was a reminder of a couple of things.

One is that I'm getting old. It doesn't feel all that long ago that Callison was blasting a homer to win the All-Star Game. He shouldn't be 67 years old already. For me, he'll always look like his baseball card.

The other is that 1964, his greatest year, remains a painful memory for any Phillies fan old enough to remember it. I was 12.

Fan Bill Exaros of Bethlehem submitted a tribute to Callison and that season, and I found it beautifully expressed our feelings. Here it is:

They've unveiled the finalists for naming the Lehigh Valley's Triple A baseball team. You can read a story about it here.

Looking at the list, I can't help but suspect that the team's front-office guys who chose the finalists were trying to steer us to one choice. The list includes the Lehigh Valley Crushers, Gobblers, Keystones, Phantastics, Phillies. Vulcans and Woodchucks. All remarkably lame. The names I was floating as a joke are better than most of those. And Bulldogs, my favorite, is far superior.

But there's one name on the list that stands out like Ed Rendell in a leotard.

The Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs.

Excellent logo potential, mascot possibilities and promotion fodder. Pigs aren't exactly perceived as fierce, but the "iron" makes them sound tough. And at least it does have some local connection, although only ex-steelworkers will be able to relate to it.

Here's a team song, to the tune of "Sidewalks of New York":

East Side, West Side, all 'round A-B-E. Pig fans are snorting and rooting their team on to victory. Sloppy field's no problem, not for these hard-hitting swine, Iron Pigs crashing to victory, then they'll hit the trough to dine.

I hate being manipulated, and I really do think they deliberately stocked the rest of the list with losers to get us where they want us to go. But I also don't want the local team to have the lamest name in organized baseball, now that there are no more Ambassadors.

So we really have no choice. Repeat after me: Oink. Oink. And stuff that ballot box for the Iron Pigs.

I've made it very clear that I'm a big fan of Mark Trail, which isn't really my topic for today, but bear with me.

Cartoonist Jack Elrod has his hang-ups -- an aversion to facial hair and long sideburns, for example -- but I'm OK with that. It makes it easier to spot the villains. The bearnappers who just snatched Molly from Mark Trail's jeep -- what kind of idiot leaves his bear sitting in an open jeep while he goes shopping? -- are a good example. In fact, the population of brainless, morally bankrupt, long-sideburned, mulletted hillbillies in the vicinity of Lost Forest is astounding.

This is a good thing. But I have a bone to pick with Mr. Elrod.

We learned today that the bearnappers are named Jake and Snake Moore. I suspect this marks Elrod as a Denver Broncos fan -- this perhaps is an obscure reference, so I'll note that Jake "the Snake" Plummer is the team's quarterback -- but the problem is that Elrod just used Snake as the name of another villain just a couple of years ago. For reasons that never made any sense, Snake McGuinn kidnapped Andy, Mark's St. Bernard. It ended badly.

As it happens, Elrod recycles that plot regularly. Andy spends more time in captivity than the Man in the Iron Mask. But the least Elrod can do is come up with different names for his animalnappers. I like the name Snake as much as the next guy, but what's wrong with Spike? Butch? Lefty? Doesn't it get confusing in town when everyone is named Snake?

OK, now that I have that off my chest, let's get to my real subject, a much weightier one:

I got a reminder the other day of one reason I would never want to be a politician.

Charles Dertinger, the Democrat who faces an uphill battle this fall against incumbent U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, had called a press conference at the Hamilton Family Restaurant in Allentown.

I decided to show up, just for the heck of it. I know Dertinger a bit from his Northampton County government work -- I haven't been particularly complimentary -- but hadn't seen him in action as a congressional candidate.

There was no sign of Dertinger when I walked into the Ham Fam five minutes early, but I eventually figured out that he was in a back room with about a dozen of his followers/campaign workers. A Morning Call reporter showed up not long after I did. No one else turned up from the press or the general public until a cameraman from Channel 69 showed up, about a half hour late. We waited for him.

It was telling that the press conference didn't go ahead without the TV guy. When it comes to name recognition, Dertinger can't hold a candle to Dent. Dertinger needs all the air time he can get.

Just as an aside, here's a bit of inside information about the media. Channel 69 and other TV stations are notorious for showing up late to events. Part of this probably is because their newspeople are stretched thin, but I suspect another factor is that they know the politicians will wait for them.

Having me show up for the event usually is a bad sign, from the politician's standpoint -- I tend to be up to no good -- but they're happy to see newspaper reporters attend, especially when the politician is running for something. Still, the real coup is to get TV news there. For that, they'll wait all afternoon if they have to.

In the wake of my column this morning about choosing a name for the Lehigh Valley's new Triple A franchise, I received several more suggestions. Most of them were much better than anything I had come up with.

Here are some of the best. As we go along, they'll become less facetious:

I noticed that a couple of people ripped Frank Sinatra in response to one of my blog entries this week about, among other things, the new Tony Bennett duets album. Actually, they were weighing in on the relative merits of Bennett, Barbra Streisand and Charlie Manuel, but Frank came in for some collateral damage.

I agree with reader Gwen that Frank's own "Duets" album, in which his collaborators had to sing along with tapes of him instead of joining him in person, was terrible. These things only work when there's some chemistry between the singers, and that's hard to do if you won't even let them in your studio.

But I also detected a more general rebuke of Sinatra's talents, and that I couldn't allow to go unchallenged.

I was going to ask for your suggestions on what to call the Lehigh Valley's AAA baseball team, but I decided to do my own top 10 list as part of a future column. Based on the number of comments I usually get here, I figure there are only about five of you reading this blog anyway, and three of you hate me. If you have any funny ideas I might be able to steal for the column, let me know.

I also was going to write about how ironic it is that so many sports writers are writing about how ridiculous it is that so many sports writers are writing about Terrell Owens, but it occurred to me that it would be hypocritical for me to write in my blog about how ridiculous it is that so many sports writers are writing about how ridiculous it is that so many people are writing about Terrell Owens.

So I won't.

Instead, I'll remark that this may well be the Golden Age of Television. Almost any night of the week, you can watch very high quality network TV shows, and some of the best stuff -- "24" and "The Sopranos," among others -- is on hiatus. Some nights, even taping stuff on DVR, I'm missing excellent programs.

There's still some dreck, of course, but not nearly as much as there used to be. Look at tonight's schedule. At 8:00, you have "My Name is Earl," "Survivor," "Smallville" and "Ugly Betty." "Grey's Anatomy" and "CSI" at 9. "ER" and "Six Degrees" (haven't seen it, but I hear it's good) at 10. Plus baseball playoffs.

I suspect a few of you are sneering at me for including "Smallville" and "Survivor." I confess I've been hooked for years on those old WB "teenager shows," as my wife calls them. "Everwood" is gone, but I still like "Gilmore Girls," "Smallville" and to a lesser extent, "One Tree Hill." I would argue that "Everwood" and "Gilmore Girls" have been getting the shaft from Emmy voters for years.

"Survivor" is another guilty pleasure, although I don't watch it now because I'm hooked on "My Name is Earl." In any event, that's a lot of entertaining shows, old and new, for one night.

My favorite new shows are "Studio 60 on Sunset Strip" and "Friday Night Lights," both of which are great examples of what I'm talking about. "Lights," a show about high school football in a small Texas town, is so beautifully done that you wonder if they can sustain that kind of quality over the long haul.

So far, I also like "The Nine" and "Standoff." The latter is kind of formulaic, but I like the two stars, especially Ron Livingston, the guy from the movie classic "Office Space."

“I thank you for bringing me these e-mails, and I can assure you that I’ll take care of it,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert promised House Majority Leader John Boehner. “We can’t have our congressmen hitting on young pages. It’s unseemly.”

“It’s beyond unseemly,” Boehner said. “We’re Republicans, for heaven’s sake. We don’t go chasing after teenage boys. Good grief, he’s the chairman of our committee on exploited children! Can you imagine the headlines?”

“There is a certain irony to that.”

“How long have you known about this guy? I'm told some this stuff was common knowledge.”

“I can’t recall, but it won’t happen again, I assure you.”

“Let’s hope not.”

Hastert hung up the phone and stroked his jowls. Need to handle this delicately, he thought. The political implications were terrifying.

Hastert turned to his computer, activated Instant Messenger, and composed a note to Rep. Mark Foley:

I'm in the process of reviewing a new CD by Tony Bennett. It's a collection of duets with various pop, rock and country stars. I generally hate duet albums, but this one is the exception to the rule.

One of my favorite Bennett songs is "If I Ruled the World." which he sings here with Celine Dion. I'll bite my tongue on Miss Schmaltzmeister and withhold my specific comments on the CD until my review runs. I only do a couple of reviews a year these days, and I don't want to steal my own thunder.

Rather, now that the Phillies season is over, I'll tell you what I would do with the team if I ruled the world -- or at least, ruled the Phillies boardroom. They haven't made the playoffs for years, so there is a lot of pent-up frustration in my comments.

I'm busy working on columns about our Legislature, so I'll just give you a couple of links today.

One is a link to the Pay Raise Play, "Unvouchered Excuses." It includes a cute little animated video and other information you may enjoy if you're still angry about the Legislature's illegal pay raise. Or even if you aren't.

The other is the George Allen Insult Generator, goofing on Virginia Senator Allen's knack for sticking his foot in his mouth and offending people. It's on Slate, one of the best Web sites around.